Singapore, March 8, 2015 – FOSSASIA will take place in Singapore for the first time this year. The conference will feature over 100 talks and workshops covering the latest in Free and Open Source Technology projects, including those focused on the development of Singapore as a smart nation.

The summit is hosted by NUS Enterprise, ACE, Silicon Straits, JFDI and SingTel Innov8 in partnership with IDA, Red Hat, Google, Oracle, MySQL, Mozilla Foundation, Python Foundation, Treasure Data, MBM Asia, Uptime and many more. The event will kick off on Friday at Biopolis and continue on Saturday and Sunday at JTC LaunchPad @ one-north.

The organizers are particularly excited to welcome keynote speakers including Colin Charles from MariaDB running Wikipedia one of the biggest websites in the world, Italo Vignoli – co-founder of LibreOffice, Bunnie Huang – the founder of the Novena laptop project, Stefan Koehler – lead engineer of the City of Munich’s whole-of-government Linux project LiMux, and Georg C. F. Greve – the founder of Free Software Foundation Europe.

Mario Behling, head of Program Planning, said “This year we are welcoming over 120 speakers from 26 countries, making this both the largest and most diverse FOSSASIA speaker roster ever. Of particular interest is the increasing presence of open hardware, which is important for Singapore as the growth in open hardware development combined with proximity to Asian manufacturing capacity and commitment to building a Smart Nation creates a wealth of opportunities for innovation.”

Other topics and activities include: Free and Open Source software, web and mobile development, software for education, map solutions for websites and phones, open knowledge tools, Wikipedia, open data, big data, sensor networks, free wireless networks, graphic design, fashion technology, open source knitting machines, 3D printing, key signing parties to help local developers join the PGP web of trust and the opportunity for participants to obtain their Linux Foundation Certification organised by the Linux Foundation in cooperation with OlinData.

“It is great to get Richard’s views on the development of software in Asia and learn about his ideas about Open Source and Free Software. I hope we will follow up soon about new projects and see more cooperation between the Free Software Foundation and the FOSSASIA community.”

A focus that is becoming more and more interesting is hardware and FashionTec development. One of the exciting projects taking place are knitting machines with a completely open design that are freely licensed. Richard advised to use the label “Free Hardware Design” modeled after “Free Software” for such projects.

The FOSSASIA.net project is an initiative to bring the Asian Free and Open Source Software and OpenTech community together and foster cooperation. We make it easy to find communities and projects on a map with links to the websites, social media channels, and automatically updated info from community blogs.

Communities store their information decentrally anywhere on the web – on their server, a blog, or git service. FOSSASIA.net collects information through a stardardized API file on the web. You can generate the API file with the FOSSASIA API generator on our website. Then you add your community to the FOSSASIA network website. Simply add the link of your API file to our list of communities on github.

FAQ

Where can I store my file?
We prefer that you store your file in our github repository of communities: https://github.com/fossasia/fossasia-communities. It is also possible to store it anywhere on the web, where it is publicly available, e.g. in a blog or CMS page as an attachment. However the github repo is the preferred method currently.

How about updating my file?
If you need to update your links, just upload a new file in the same location.

How do I start?
To make it easier, we created a FOSSASIA API Generator, where you can simply fill in your data here: http://api.fossasia.org/generator When you are finished copy the info from the form on the top right into an empty file or use the download button.

How do I find Geolocation data of my community?
You can find this data from OpenStreetmap. OpenStreetmap shows maps using a URL of the form: www.openstreetmap.org/#map=[Zoom Level]/[Latitude]/[Longitude] So go to www.openstreetmap.org and zoom to the area of your community. For example, if you are zoom into Mumbai, you will get the URL http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/19.0715/72.9499 Then 19.0715 will be the latitude and 72.9499 the longitude.

What is an API?
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types. An API defines functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations (e.g. It does not matter what CMS is used), which allows definitions and implementations to vary without compromising each other. Compare: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

The textil industry is dominated by some big players and proprietary file formats for digital cut patterns. With the maker scene getting a big push with 3D printers, it is time to push for open digital sewing pattern creation as well.

Susan Spencer already works for some time on this goal. She created plugins for creating and portraying sewing patterns in Inkscape and documents her work on the TauMeta Website.

The next goal is to enable designers to upload and customize patterns online through a web interface. This is why we are meeting up at a workshop after the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid. I believe this is exciting and offers many people a way to collaborate on patterns around the world.

As textil making is very big in Vietnam and other Asian countries, this could be very interesting for people. I can see that it would also offer ways for small business owners to work together.

The FOSSASIA organization has been very active and I would love to give you a few updates on our activities. One thing why we love to work in this community is because you get the chance to meet some of the most awesome and friendly tech people of the world. Jonas Smeedegaard from the Debian community is one of our guests who has been visiting us three times already and conducted workshops at our events and even stayed several weeks in Can Tho to train students using and developing Debian.

Jonas Smeedegaard at Workshop: Bringing Asian and International developers together

Meetups and Code Sprints

Of course we could not do all of this alone and we would like to thank some of the most outstanding folks we are working together with including HanoiLUG and Saigonlug in Vietnam, Singapore Hackerspace and the Beijinglug.

Coding Projects

We have recently involved and organized activities with the following projects and are glad to feature the following projects on this blog:

Wikipedia

OpenWrt

Crypto-Stick

LXDE

MoonOS

Android

GNOME

Debian

Fedora

Gimp

Inkscape

Linux conversion libraries

OpenStreetMap

and many more

FOSSASIA Event in Ho Chi Minh City

Internships

In 2012 we welcomed interns in Can Tho. Fifteen students participated in the program as full time interns in the office of MBM International in the biggest city in the Mekong delta. The program took place for 2 months and a core part of it was to learn how to use collaborative tools liker issue trackers and contribute to OpenStreetMap. Our students also love the Wikipedia sprints and we got a lot of positive vibes as everyone was happy to learn how to set up the Mediawiki software, that empowers the encyclopedia, share their ideas and spread Open Knowledge and Open Data about the Mekong Delta.

Event activities

We also continued to organize the FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit in 2010 and 2011 in Raffles College and Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. Plus we had a Mini-Debconf in Saigon and organized the event series OpenDesign.Asia Weeks bringing together designers and Open Source developers. We have links to the LXDE project and GNOME community and we have sent developers to the GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 in Hong Kong and supported the TYPO3 conference 2012 in Phnom Penh.

Also globally FOSSASIA starts to receive more attention. We have received the opportunity to introduce Asian projects at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal (2011) and Brussels (2011), at the Linuxtag in Berlin (2012) and many other community events.

Please Join us and Get in Touch

The FOSSASIA organization supports activities and Open Tech development and Open Knowledge projects of the community active in Asia. If you are interested to cooperate for a project, need support for a development sprint or an event, please contact us on the FOSSASIA mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/fossasia